The best creators experiment.
Creator Science goes inside the strategies, systems, and decisions behind the world's most successful creator businesses. Practical, specific, and grounded in what's actually working today—not what used to.
Each episode features candid conversations with creators like James Clear, Ali Abdaal, Tim Urban, and Codie Sanchez. We explore the experiments they're running, the data they're tracking, and the frameworks they use to grow their audience, build trust, and increase income.
Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, a multi-million dollar creator business, and was named Content Entrepreneur of the Year by The Tilt in 2023.
300+ episodes. New every week. This is growth for creators, down to a science.
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I brought back Becky Pierson Davidson to compare notes on where community is headed — and we found a few areas of disagreement. Becky works with 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses helping them build memberships and courses through design thinking and customer research, and she's seeing a major shift right now: course businesses are slowing down, and the smart ones are pivoting to membership models. The difference? Shared learning experiences are replacing self-paced education. Community is what peopl...
Sid Yadav is the CEO and co-founder of Circle, a community platform trusted by creators like Jay and thousands of others to build membership businesses. Today, Circle has ~280 employees and has raised around $30 million. Before Circle, he was the third hire at Teachable, where he helped build the infrastructure for the creator economy before the term even existed. He spent four years as a tech blogger, writing about startups five to ten times a day, and was one of the first people to ever cover ...
Every few years, someone asks you the question you've been avoiding. For me, this was it: does your show actually have a premise, or does it just require people to already know and like you? Jeremy Enns is the founder of Podcast Marketing Academy, where his primary product is podcast audits. He has spent years analyzing what separates shows that grow from shows that stall, and he runs Podcast Marketing Academy to help hosts fix both. He has been a member of The Lab since the early days. In this ...
Richard van der Blom published his first LinkedIn algorithm report years ago as a curiosity project. This year, he and his team analyzed 1.3 million posts from 50,000 creators — and the headline number is hard to ignore: reach is down 60% for active creators over the last two years. Even harder to stomach: 80% of the comments Richard receives in the first five minutes of any post are written by AI. Richard is the author of the annual LinkedIn Algorithm Insights report — the most data-backed inde...
Josh is the founder of Upright Media, an operating partner for content creators handling operations, consulting, recruiting, and post-production. His clients include some of YouTube's biggest channels — Erak, Smosh, Emma Chamberlain, Dude Perfect, Matthew Beam, and Chris Williamson. He runs 11 full-time staff and about 40 contractors worldwide. He describes himself as a creator without a channel. This conversation also took a turn into what YouTube actually rewards right now, why "companionship ...
Every month inside the Lab, I do a full retrospective: wins, concerns, experiments, with all the numbers on the table. I've never felt comfortable putting the whole thing out publicly, but I do think the practice itself is worth sharing. So this episode is my lightweight version: three big wins from April, three things I'm genuinely worried about heading into May, and three experiments I'm kicking off. I'm also testing a new name for this format: the Big Three. April was, by most measures, a rea...
I’ve been a full-time creator for 8 years now and have earned $2,192,000 since 2022. I’ve spent a LOT of time and money experimenting with different ways to make money on the internet, so I’m going to rank them. The best and the worst. I show you 15 different revenue streams and rate them from S to F based on their potential versus the effort required. By the very end of the video, you’ll know which ones are right for you. And at any point, if you agree or disagree, let me know in the comments. ...
Sam Vander Wielen is an attorney turned entrepreneur who built the go-to legal template shop for online businesses. Her flagship product, the Ultimate Bundle, a package of fill-in-the-blank contracts and video trainings, has generated over $8 million in lifetime revenue and now earns close to $2 million per year with essentially one full-time employee. She published her first book with Hachette in April 2025, and she runs everything through a single evergreen webinar funnel that quietly generate...
Riley Brown posted the first TikTok video about ChatGPT the day it launched. It got 20 million views and took him from zero to 200K followers in less than two weeks. Since then, he's built an audience of 1.5 million across platforms, raised $9 million to co-found a vibe-coding startup in San Francisco, and developed a content system so systematic that a single viral video gets reposted across seven accounts every week for the rest of the year. In this episode, Riley shares his philosophy for sta...
This episode is a little different. Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit , with over a million copies sold, reached out and offered to do something I didn't expect: a live coaching session, recorded, here on the podcast. The topic: my delegation issue. Not the tactics (I know the tactics). Something deeper has its foot on the brake. What unfolded was one of the most honest, vulnerable conversations I've had on this show. Michael walked me through the Immunity to Change framework,...
Nir Eyal has spent his career studying why people don't do what they know they should. After writing Hooked and Indistractable, he kept getting a strange kind of call: readers who'd read the book, knew the steps, and still didn't do them. That puzzle led him down a six-year research path into the one variable missing from every motivation model: belief. In this conversation, Nir shares the science behind his new NYT bestseller Beyond Belief , and the framework that explains why knowing what to d...
I recorded this just a few days removed from an author's mastermind in Franklin, Tennessee. I got a call from Haley at Kit a few weeks ago—she was putting together a small group mastermind with James Clear, and I was on the list. What I didn't expect was that the rest of the list was a dozen New York Times bestselling authors, including Jefferson Fisher, Vanessa Van Edwards, Amy Porterfield, Nir Eyal, Sahil Bloom, Tori Dunlap, and more. Over three days, I took pages of notes. This episode breaks...
Eric Zimmer launched The One You Feed podcast in 2014 with no audience, no name recognition, and a podcast name that took explaining. Twelve years, 850+ episodes, and 500 million downloads later, he released his first book — How a Little Becomes a Lot — a title that is, in every way, the story of his life. In this conversation, we talk about how incremental progress actually works, why you can't see it happening in real time, and why that's actually fine. We also go deep on the business reality ...
Nearing the end of Q1, I've been doing a lot of reflection on where the creator economy is heading, and where I want to take Creator Science. There's something interesting happening on the ground: the same energy that used to funnel beginners into content creation has largely shifted to AI and vibe coding. And honestly? I think that's a good thing. The people still showing up for this work seem to have their heads and hearts in the right place. In this episode, I walk you through 9 priorities on...
Joy Sullivan is a Portland-based poet who quit her corporate job mid-pandemic and built a thriving creative business through writing carousels on Instagram (115K followers), her Substack "Necessary Salt" (23K subscribers), and a 250-member paid writing community called Sustenance on Circle. She's a former Lab member, and in 2024, she published her first book, Instructions for Traveling West, with Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. What makes her path genuinely unusual: she grew her ...
Richard is the co-founder of 1of10 , a research platform built by YouTube strategists, and his team has quietly been behind the scenes for some of the biggest channels on the platform—helping creators accumulate over 2 billion views through a repeatable, data-backed system. In this episode, Richard walks through his complete four-phase ideation system—audience identification, outlier research (using five distinct methods), idea remixing, and validation—and backs every step with real examples. We...
I brought back Becky Pierson Davidson to compare notes on where community is headed — and we found a few areas of disagreement. Becky works with 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses helping them build memberships and courses through design thinking and customer research, and she's seeing a major shift right now: course businesses are slowing down, and the smart ones are pivoting to membership models. The difference? Shared learning experiences are replacing self-paced education. Community is what peopl...
Rob Walling is a godfather of the bootstrapped SaaS movement — he's started 6 companies (5 bootstrapped), built and sold Drip for 8 figures, and created the infrastructure behind MicroConf, TinySeed (which has raised nearly $60 million and invested in over 210 SaaS companies), and Startups for the Rest of Us (820+ episodes over 15 years). But here's what surprised me: Rob told me he's more of a creator these days than a software founder. The guy who built and sold an email marketing platform now...
Mike Michalowicz is the author of Profit First , which is used by hundreds of thousands of companies across the globe to drive profit – Creator Science is one of those companies. Profit First has helped me develop sound financials for my business. He’s also the author of Clockwork, a powerful method to make any business run on automatic, and seven other books as well. With more than 500,000 book sales, all of Mike’s books have the same goal – to help small business owners and eliminate what he...
The world is changing faster than ever, and sometimes it feels like the old playbooks just aren't working anymore. In this solo episode, I share 12 opportunities I see for creators in 2026—ideas that range from the practical to the philosophical, from the obvious to the genuinely weird. These aren't predictions. They're possibilities. And you don't need to pursue all of them. But keeping a running list of where opportunity exists can help you find the direction that feels most right for you. Som...
This week I'm joined by my good friend Chenell Basilio, creator of Growth in Reverse and one of the most thorough newsletter analysts in the space. We spent over an hour diving deep into what's really working in email right now — from the death of newsletter hype to the opportunity hiding in recommendation networks. Chenell shared her framework of "insanely valuable content" (the one thing that matters more than any growth hack), and we got surprisingly honest about using AI to create short-form...
Over the last 48-72 hours, I completely fell down the rabbit hole with a new AI tool called Clawdbot (rebranded TODAY to Moltbot). Instead of my planned episode about what's on my mind in January 2026, I decided to share my raw, unfiltered experience setting up this AI assistant that runs 24/7 and integrates with all my tools. This isn't your typical AI chat interface—it's an always-on assistant I can text through Telegram that proactively handles research, automates workflows, and maintains ins...
Every month inside The Lab, I do what I call a monthly retro. It's short for retrospective. The idea is that, on a regular basis, you look back at what you have just done to learn from it, course-correct, and move forward. So in my monthly retros, I look at the good things that happened, how I performed against my goals, the concerns I currently have, the changes I'm going to make moving forward, and my goals for next month. → Join The Lab → Subscribe to the newsletter → Read my 2025 Year In Rev...
Paul Millerd is the author of The Pathless Path , which has earned Paul $325,000 in royalties to date. In the process, Paul turned down a publishing offer from Penguin, one of the major publishers in the industry. Then, in December, Paul decided to double down and produce a new version of The Pathless Path , an ultra-premium hardcover book that is just beautiful. So in this episode, we talk about that decision, the dark side of traditional publishing, the book deal Paul WOULD have taken, and whe...
A few weeks ago, I came across a post on X from a user named Yoni Smolyar. It said, "Posting a video on Instagram every day for 508 days in a row taught me that I never want to do that again." I realized that I had seen and followed Yoni on Instagram, where he has over 190,000 followers. In the process, Yoni built an iPhone app called Brainrot, which had a $10,000 launch that he credits to his social media presence that he built during this daily Instagram posting challenge. In this conversation...
Today I am sharing an episode between Josh hall and myself. Josh hall is a good friend of mine, a business owner, and a creator here in Columbus, Ohio. His business is all about web design and he has a podcast called Web Design Business with Josh Hall, and I was a recent guest. So this is a conversation with Josh as friends, talking about what I've learned over the last year. Plus as a new father, how that has impacted my work and why it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but definitely a choice I...
In 2020, Ankur Nagpal sold his course platform, Teachable, for around $250 million. But he knew that the sale would come with a giant tax bill. So Ankur became obsessed with the tax code, and he wanted to make it easier for everyone to legally operate within it. That led him to discover Solo 401(k)s. So he built a new company called Carry that helps you legally keep more of what you earn and invest it the way you want. This podcast is for informational purposes, and not intended to be financial ...
Jay Clouse joins Howie Chan to delve into the psychology of trust in the creator space. They discuss the historical and modern erosion of trust, the four key traits of trustworthiness (competency, reliability, empathy, integrity), and how creators can build a trust-first business. The conversation also covers personal branding, avoiding the traps of manipulation, and strategic advice for creators starting over, emphasizing persistence and a compelling market premise.
Meet Tommy. Tommy has a YouTube channel dedicated to helping Americans retire in France. Tommy’s done an incredible job attracting nearly 30,000 subscribers and 2 million views on his channel, but he needed help dialing in his product offer. Tommy is a member of The Lab, my invitation-only membership community for 6-and-7-figure creators. He scheduled a coaching call with me to work out how he can take his growing audience and design his product offers to both serve that audience and bring in se...
Jay Clouse introduces his new Signature Product Bootcamp, a four-week live course designed to help creators develop a single, confident product. He explains how a signature product combats the creator's financial stress and launch cycles by building mindshare and providing a reliable income stream. The bootcamp offers clarity on product promise, format, positioning, pricing, and naming, setting creators up for long-term success.
